STAMFORD — At least 30 boats and crews will compete in the 30th annual Mayor’s Cup on Long Island Sound Sunday.

The race begins at 11:20 a.m. and will likely run throughout the afternoon. Mayor David Martin will take in the proceedings from a VIP boat. The Halloween Yacht Club organizes the race along with the Breakwater Irregulars.

Registration officially closed at 6 p.m. Wednesday and 30 boats had already registered by that morning, but race organizers expect some late entries as well.

“We’ve got them separated in five different classes,” said Vivian Werner, a yacht club member who served on the planning committee for the race. “We’ve got two spinnaker, two non-spinnaker and then we’ve got a catboat race.”

A spinnaker is a type of sail that balloons outward over a boat’s bow.

“A catboat is basically a boat that has one sail, one big mainsail,” explained Werner. “The other boats have typically two sails, a mainsail and then a headsail.”

Werner said the divisions were set up to make the races more even and exciting.

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“Typically larger boats go faster, the more water line you have, the faster the boat is,” Werner said. “It’s frustrating to have a race where you have very fast boats and very slow boats, so we divide them so they’re sort of in classes so they can have a competition going.”

The Mayors Cup is a qualifying race for the Yacht Racing Association - Long Island Sound’s Gitana, Sappho, Competitors’, Kings Point and Mertz trophies. Some proceeds go to the Young Mariners Foundation, which teaches sailing to local elementary and middle-school children.

“It came about really as something we could do as a community event to showcase the waterfront and give back to the community,” Werner said.

“The Mayor’s Cup helps our city reconnect with its maritime heritage,” Martin said in a prepared statement. “It fosters pride in our waterfront and increases the sense of community spirit in our great city.”

The best place to watch the race is on a boat nearby, although Werner said landlubbers may be able to catch sight of it from the tip of Shippan Point.

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